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Paul Wolfowitz's Remarks at Malaria Center in Tzaneen, South Africa

                                             Paul Wolfowitz
                                       President of the World Bank
                                             March 15, 2007


Paul Wolfowitz: The statistics on malaria are just dreadful. A million people die every year, 90% of them
are children. If you think about it, that’s 3,000 people a day, that’s as many died in the World Trade
Center, but day after, day after day, and 90% of them are in Africa, and it is as it has been said now a
preventable disease. It’s a complicated disease I am learning. It is affected by climate and it is affected by
the different factors that you encounter.

So, the treatment may not be the same in every place, but clearly something needs to be done. At the
World Bank, we have substantially increased the amount of money that we are dedicating to this fight;
just in the last 14 months, I believe, we have made grants of $367 million to some 12 African countries
and one West Africa regional program that compares to $50 million in first 5 years of this decade. So, we
have scaled up significantly. The Global Fund of course as we mentioned has scaled up significantly.

There is more money, I think, to come but what is also important is knowing what works and the reason I
was so eager to come here, apart from persuasiveness of your ambassador which would be reason
enough was that I have heard that this year is one of the success stories and the statistics you mentioned
demonstrate that, and we need to learn better what works, so that we can apply what works in other
places. It may or may not work exactly in some other place because I think you have said the climate is
different here, but clearly, we need to learn from the experience and I am eager to take advantage of this
time here to see what your experience has been, but let me just conclude by thanking our beautiful
ambassador.

She did a magnificent job in Washington promoting the cause at the White House Malaria Summit in
December, and I know she is doing it all around the world and she does it with passion and belief
because she has experienced personally what malaria can do.

Let me thank all of you first of all for coming here today, but more importantly thank you for what you do
everyday; this is really -- it's a life and death struggle for so many people and most of them are children
and most of them deserve -- they all deserve a better life and most of them can be great contributors if we
can just help them stay healthy. Thank you very much.